Throughout the realms of fashion and sweetness, a shift towards diversity in casting implies that representation of assorted bodies and multiple ethnicities is progressively improving. Throughout the worlds of dating and sex nevertheless, things are more staid; irrespective of how progressive we appear to be getting as a culture in the best way that we view beauty, in relation to individual desire we are sometimes judgemental and discriminatory.

A famous blog post from 2014 detailed how on OKCupid, as an example, black women and Asian men are the least liked or least desired on the platform, and on apps like Grindr, not much has modified – minority ethnic people experience a lot fetishisation and racism that the app-makers needed to publicly address the difficulty by launching an anti-racism campaign last 12 months. Statistics have found that women discriminate against short men in dating, and men harass larger women. Across sites like YouPorn, plus-size women are reduced to look terms that harness the demeaning language of fetish.

Yet, all of this still doesn’t quite bring to life what it looks like to be on the receiving end of this treatment in your dating or sex life. A couple of months ago 29-year-old plus-size blogger Stephanie Yeboah experienced this racism and fat-phobia first hand, when she came upon that a man she had gone on two dates with had slept along with her as a bet, for money. She received an email from his friend explaining that he had been dared to ‘pull a fat chick’. The experience – although extremely upsetting – wasn’t in isolation for her; she has been made to feel without delay objectified and undesirable throughout her life and particularly, her sex life.

Stephanie’s response to all this discrimination has been to vary the narrative around what we see as beautiful through her work as a journalist, a fat acceptance advocate and a public speaker. Similarly, Michelle Elman – 25 now but who had 15 surgeries before the age of 20 – began the Scarred Not Scared campaign, which champions body positivity and goals to erode a few of the stigma around surgery scars. This work resulted in becoming a body confidence coach, speaker, and writing the book, “Am I Ugly?” which is a response to the statistic that 10,000 women a month google the identical phrase. In it, she looks at body image, the complex issue of why we as a culture find some ethnicities, body sizes and body types more desirable or attractive than others, and the way we are able to move past these hierarchies.

Stephanie and Michelle have each experienced discrimination of their dating and sex lives based on their race, their body size, and in Michelle’s case, her scarring. In a time when sex and dating can feel especially frightening in the event you’re anything lower than conventionally beautiful, we asked Stephanie and Michelle to have a conversation about how feelings of desirability are socially constructed, how they feed into attitudes towards consent, and the way all women can feel more beautiful and sexually empowered.

Firstly, what does beauty mean to you?
Stephanie Yeboah: Beauty to me means loving yourself and living unapologetically in a world that tells us to not. Beauty means feeling comfortable in your skin and loving and appreciating your imperfections.

Michelle Elman: Beauty is sort of meaningless to me in that I do not think it should define you or be a prerequisite with a purpose to be heard and have your opinion valued. Whilst I agree with the side of body positivity that claims everybody is gorgeous, I also think it is just empowering if we also imagine that we’re greater than our beauty.

Does sex make you are feeling beautiful?
Stephanie Yeboah: I believe it completely is determined by the person it’s with. I find that I personally do best in long run relationships; that is once I feel most beautiful. It makes me feel extremely confident and powerful. There is a certain sense of power when being at your most vulnerable and, for me, undertaking the act with someone you’re in a relationship with or have deep feelings more, makes me feel even higher about myself and my body.

Michelle Elman: I would not say sex makes me feel beautiful, my beauty exists irrespective of how much or how little sex I even have but it surely does make me feel confident in my body and it does make feel empowered when it’s a positive experience. The times when it hasn’t been are when the opposite person hasn’t listened to my needs or has tried to pressure me into doing something I wasn’t comfortable with. Unfortunately, that is way too frequent where partners, specifically men, shall be persistent in asking for a similar thing over and all over again in an try and wear you down.

“In a bid to look ‘normal’, you take part in sexual activities that you might otherwise not feel 100% comfortable with”

In your personal experience, how do sex and sweetness relate?
Michelle Elman: I believe often times within the media, we’re taught sex is for beautiful people and in the event you are outside of the sweetness ideal, you’ll struggle to search out someone who will wish to have sex with you. Particularly with fat women, they’re rarely portrayed as having loving relationships, or perhaps a relationship that may not riddled with insecurity they usually are most definitely not shown having enjoyable sex. Within the bedroom, I often think beauty becomes an obstacle for pleasure because quite a lot of people concentrate on maintaining their beauty. They worry about unflattering angles or sweating and it prevents them from actually having fun with the moment fairly than having a conversation of their head about what they may appear like. 

Stephanie, you might have said that you are feeling like prior to now you might have said yes to sex because you are feeling like you must or it’s all you deserve? What does this say about beauty and consent?
Stephanie Yeboah: When your appearance falls outside of what society would consider to be ‘beautiful’ it could affect you in quite a lot of alternative ways, this includes dating, sex and relationships. Being plus size, it is usually harder to be seen as attractive enough to this point or have sex with and so there have been times when some people will put themselves in sexual situations for the sake of with the ability to say that they’ve had that have, with a purpose to slot in. I definitely feel that there’s a strong link between beauty and consent; when low self-esteem comes into play and also you do not feel nearly as good about your body, you may have the mindset that you simply’re only ok for a particular sort of partner, or in a bid to look ‘normal’, you take part in sexual activities that you might otherwise not feel 100% comfortable with.

So is sex intersectional?
Stephanie Yeboah: With regards to dating and sex it could be a bit tougher to navigate when you might have certain intersections that apply. For myself, it’s being black and fat. We’re often seen as dominant and aggressive based on negative stereotypes related to black women, which suggests being approached by men for sexual reasons. It makes it tougher to trust people’s intentions and makes it difficult to grow relationships because it appears to be purely sexual. Access is incredibly difficult as while you do look different from what society sees as beautiful, it seems you’re either ignored, humiliated or fetishised, and makes it extremely hard to search out and develop real relationships.  

What about fetishisation, do you ever feel fetishised?
Stephanie Yeboah: Being a darker-skinned black fat woman, being consistently fetishised is a component and parcel of the entire dating game. We’re sometimes called BBWs (Big Beautiful Women – a pornagraphic category on web sites), which is a fetish that normally involves larger women and smaller men. As I predominantly use dating sites, I are likely to normally be approached by men seeking to be ‘sat on’ by fatter women, or men seeking to feed women until they burst, because it is a large activate for them. I’m also approached consistently by white men who’ve fetishes for black women, solely due to stereotypes which are made about black women’s bodies, in addition to our temperment (aggressive, bossy, dominating, “sassy”). This fetish, combined with the fat fetish, makes it extremely difficult to this point in the event you are on the lookout for a real relationship, as men are likely to see you as a sexual anomaly, versus a human being. It’s incredibly invalidating.

Michelle Elman: In my experience, it’s someone sees that “fetish” or that component of you greater than they see the remaining of your being. By way of being Chinese, or more broadly Asian, I even have found it’s when persons are more concerned about the actual fact I’m Asian than some other a part of myself like my personality. I had an advanced relationship with understanding what constituted as a fetish, especially by way of race, because it isn’t ever that clearcut. One among my friends who can be Chinese, explained it best to me once I asked what the difference was between “a kind” or a “fetish”. I could not understand how you would have a kind like being into blondes, but when it was race-related it was a fetish and he or she said that “in the event you found each member of that subsection attractive, then that is a fetish”. 

What has your personal experience with scarring taught you about sex, each positive or negative?
Michelle Elman: I used to be extremely self-conscious about my scars in my teenage years and early twenties and I at all times found it made things difficult each by way of sex and relationships to completely trust someone. The scars itself are one thing, but they provoke questions and the stories behind those scars are a few of my most personal memories and in addition essentially the most traumatic memories. This makes it complicated because sometimes I even have felt I used to be comfortable enough to sleep with an individual, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to enter those stories and finding that balance of how I might be vulnerable whilst still feeling protected has been necessary. As I overcame my insecurities around it, I realised that the more time I spent fascinated with my body in sex, the less I used to be actually having fun with the sex itself.

“Desire is available in all styles and sizes and it is time that the media reflects that”

So how can we improve women’s sexual empowerment by changing the best way that we discuss beauty?
Michelle Elman: I believe we must be showing different body types in sexually empowering ways and that this needs to be commonplace within the media. We want to remove quite a lot of the shame that exists in sexual conversations as that creates silence around the difficulty and makes people feel isolated in the problems they might need with their partner. I also think there’s a lot miseducation around sex basically – as Emily Nagoski puts it, we see male sexual arousal because the norm and we compare women to them because the benchmark when it has been shown that not only do our sexual organs differ but so does how we develop into sexually aroused. On account of the dearth of conversation around this, this leads to women believing that they’re broken and society has normalised women’s lack of sexual pleasure an excessive amount of. 

On top of that, women are taught at such a young age that with a purpose to be enough as a lady, you might have to be validated by a relationship and, as we become old, we learn with a purpose to be a ‘good wife’, that you must sexually satisfy your partner. Not once are women taught to prioritise their very own sexual needs or to even prioritise their very own sexual pleasure within the bedroom and if we proceed teaching women this, there’ll still be plenty of women overriding their very own needs.

Stephanie Yeboah: Sexual empowerment comes from feeling confident and attractive in our skin, and the primary technique to try this is to make sure that people of all ages, races, weights, sexualities and skills feel beautiful, equally. This might be done by changing the best way during which society values – and sees – beauty. The Westernised standard of beauty must be completely eradicated, and types, publications and the media have to do so much more work in being as inclusive and as diverse as possible, ensuring that each one people feel valued and exquisite. Visibility is vital: we want to see fat people having sex scenes in movies, disabled people being the love interest, black women being seen as desirable as a substitute of being the sassy black friend and so forth. Desire is available in all styles and sizes and it is time that the media reflects that.